Photographs by Jamie Hamilton + Performance Collaboration with Hannah Hughes

Absolute contingency describes the extravagant idea that nothing is necessary or subject to reason, rather everything must be able to be otherwise. Exhilarating or nihilistic? Exhilarating and nihilistic? Hamilton and Hughes share a language that revels in baroque extremes, fragmentation and uncertainty, expressing their ambivalent fascination with contemporary structures.

Jamie Hamilton’s photographs of recent sculptures situated among drapery and dichroic glass mirrors use multiple film exposures and are optically printed on silver gelatin paper. Although solely created through analog technologies these works uncannily allude to digital space. Phantasmagorical landscapes of roaming, gazing and manipulating machines suggest a world without empathy and responsibility. Notions of cybernetic progress are challenged by this seductive and haunting pictorial narrative.

Hannah Hughes’s live performance is a riff on Bernini’s St.Teresa incorporating a sculpture of aluminum and dichroic glass called Compound Growth by Jamie Hamilton and fabric remnants culled from garment factories in the building. Instead of divine light, this Teresa receives drops of black oil on her heart in a meditation on the anthropocene era and the replacement of religious belief with absolute contingency.